Still, their battery test needs a remake. I like the site and I get their target audience, but they themselves already mentioned the battery test is flawed and it's something they're going to improve in the near future.

The nexus line seems to spare no expense to present android in a good way and make it run quickly (screen, SoC, Internal memory, RAM, connectivity), while everything else just gets the job done (camera, battery, chassis, speakers).

Some exceptions are the I/O performance of the nexus 7 and the speakers of the nexus 10.

I really think google tries to make nexuses ideal for developers while at the same time not cannibalising the sales of their OEM partners. That's why we see the latest processor and the common screen size. On the other hand, you don't need a great battery or a good camera to test your app on.

If they went balls to the wall on this thing and made it uncompromisingly good, then sold it for cheap, the OEMs might get annoyed.

Yep. I think that is the way most batteries are these days. Not so bad as though you can't get through most of the day but not good enough to not worry about it. You'll basically be constantly aware of how much battery you have left and what you're doing.

It's been the biggest change for me, moving from a dumb phone. My phone could do data without a charge. Then again I only used it for talk/text while my optimus is a media device more than anything else

Same boat, I skipped the Nexus 4 because the GNex was still a relatively good phone and the extended battery "fixed" most of my complaints. I'm hoping that as launch gets closer, we get some good information about what to expect in the next version as well as more concrete details about the Nexus 5.

I got my GNex shortly after Jelly Bean, so when the N4 came out my GNex was fairly new. I also decided to get an extended battery, which helped, but when doing something like Chrome or playing even the slightest games I could still see the battery go down quickly. On normal/light usage I can get a decent 1-1.5 day, and in 1-bar signal areas the battery life is just downright horrible. I can sit there and watch it drain.

Ingress is the one game that killed the battery and forced me to get an extended battery, which helped but I still have an external battery just because even with the extended battery, consistent use is abysmal.

I sometimes play Ingress on my way home, and that's usually a 30 minute walk near the end of my battery-day, meaning usually starting around 30%. I'd play until it's near dead, while listening to music, then charge it when I get home.

a good device to me over these last 2 years or so, but at this point I'm literally at wits end with it,

I can't even turn on 3g without the battery having a meltdown, I'm really hoping that the battery life on the Nexus 5 is at least 9-10 hours of moderate use, because right now I'm carrying around an extra battery just to surf the web on, I want good battery life and honestly if I can't get it out of this new Nexus, the Moto X might be the next stop for me.

Brian Klug pointed out that the Nexus 5 seems to have envelope tracking in a recent tweet, which the G2 doesn't have. He has mentioned envelope tracking as something that is going to help battery life on the anandtech podcast, but I don't know what it is exactly and I don't want to act as if I do.

If I'm understanding the diagram. Think of the power supply for your antennae like your garden hose. Old method has two options full on our full of. This new method only uses only the powers it needs for that freq., think garden hose with a nozzle which allows you to control how much water is released.

It's not only about GPU power though, even at the same size, higher resolution displays have to pump more light through to get the same user end brightness. See the iPad 3 retina display needing dual LEDs.

Now, what about in Paranoid Android you can change the resolution of individual apps? If you had a high resolution screen, and wanted to save battery for a weekend trip or something, could you just use a low resolution on a high resolution screen?

Also, a similar but different question: if you have a high enough resolution screen, and you wanted to scale down the resolution, and if you had an AMOLED screen, could you actually turn off individual pixels in a special pattern that wouldn't degrade legibility of text horribly.

It seems like LG has done some great battery optimization through its software...I wouldn't be confident that the Nexus has anywhere near the battery life of the LG G2, mostly because the battery itself is much smaller, but because I've never seen a Nexus with great battery life besides the 2013 Nexus 7. I guess we'll see soon.

I hear people complain about the 2012 Nexus 7 all the time, but mine gets fantastic battery life... I can watch like three movies on it before it conks out. On a 7" screen, that seems pretty impressive to me.

If there's no tweaking or performance benefits in 4.4 to boost battery life, dividing the g2 WiFi browsing life by 3000 and then multiplying by 2300 gives 8.226 hours - in the same territory as the Moto X or Note 2.

The quoted talk time on 3G in the service manual also pegs it as similar to Moto X or HTC One, so it should be perfectly fine for most people to get a day (16-18 hours of average use) out of. If you need more, buy a Droid Maxx or G2.

Thanks for the info. I'd never buy the Maxx because of its software support. I recall people not being all to pleased with the HTC One's battery. Hmmm. If I don't get the Nexus 5, I'll get the G2 if the N5's ROM will be easy for devs to port. Still leaning N5 though.

yeah, moto ... :) there may be a grey market reseller in hong kong, let me see what comes up.

i found a couple for the samsung, but google cn/hk is awkward to search with. even in HK/CN (poor use of SEOs or shop websites). you may have some luck with eBay UK or US resellers, (don't use USPS, should be $60 for fedex) for 2nd hand Moto X's due to the microphone issue, and xmas 2nd hand sales.

you will tend to find the 16gb version though.(or at least i did) there are also locked and branded versions, a 32gb version, black is also harder to find.

LTE channel on the XT1058 appears to be compatible with LTE 7 band, which opens up in october next year in australia across carriers. but that might be a while, doesnt have 3 band for AU.

WCDMA, you''ll get 850 (telstra) /900 (optus)/2100(city) for the 1058 (and most of the variations on the XT 1058)

As simple as it gets with battery size only compared, 2300mAh/3000mAh, the Nexus 5 is only 70% of the G2 battery. The way i think of it is if the G2 gives 24 hour battery life during hypothetical usage, the N5 would give 18.4 hours. This is only taking in the battery size into account, no software benefits included.

I've kinda lost all hopes for Android being more optimized for batteries. Well, it's not really Android (the OS) that's the problem. It's the Android services. Most Android devices last long on Airplane mode. The applications/services just keeps getting more network intensive.

With the introduction of Google Now, Google Music, Google Keep and more and more network apps, while YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps become heavier network consumption applications, batteries have become the deficient.

It is, but unless you're using 6 hours of screen on time each day, a lot of us go around with our phones in our pocket. So those optimizations DO matter because Android is always 1 wakelock away from getting terrible battery life for the day.

I'm not happy with my N4's battery at all, although with the proper setup I can easily make it through the day and then some. There's a lot that can be done from a software perspective before having to resort to sheer battery size or specs.

I'm sure they do more than break even, although I wouldn't call their profit "decent". Most flagship phones cost between $200 and $250 to manufacture, so they have a pretty big profit margin. A $300 phone wouldn't give them as much profit, but I'm sure it would do much better than break even.

But they are, and that's the general sentiment around here. It HAS to be $300, and it if it's not, it sucks. If there's any hardware compromises, it also has to be because they HAVE to hit the $300 price point.

I've seen a few different guesstimates that it will be in the mid-400's - but if they're able to make it less expensive that would be fantastic. One issue is that many people (not around here though) don't believe their phone ever costs more than $199 or whatever contract deal is out there, so if the realistic break even point is mid 4's they'll have a cow. But the BOM might not allow it much lower as they still need to clear the cost, shipping and customer support.

The chassis of both devices aren't identical. Looks like the N5 is thinner and wiring to be different due to the N5 having a classic button arrangement. The most prevailing assumption is Google cut corners to keep the price down. I think its more of a battery footprint thing. Its really any body's guess.

I know that people keep bringing these issues up, and while efficiency is on the rise, there's no indication that power consumption in load is dropping. People always cite P4s for example. High heat, and low performing, but in the end their TDP was roughly the same.

What modern processors have been working on is trying to get that idle power down. Anand mentioned this in his iPhone 5 Review where he said

I believe the days of us having straightforward discussions about better/worse battery life are long gone. We are now firmly in the era of expanded dynamic range when it comes to smartphone power consumption.

A lot of why the N4 was bad wasn't solely because of bad load power. It was the bad idle power consumption. Therefore these static battery benchmarks where they loop webpages and MP4 videos are only 1 indicator of bad battery life. GSM Arena's endurance rating is probably as close as it gets to having any information on idle power consumption. I'm not even sure how they get that endurance rating.

Since no one's mentioned it yet, I should point that the G2 has a 3.7V battery and the Nexus 5 a 3.8V. A minor difference, but it it were bigger, it'd make the amp-hour rating alone insufficient. It's the watt-hours (amp-hours * volts) that you'd wanna look at.

That's the battery side. The software/other hardware side has been covered already.

Battery capacity is pretty much 100% linear. You will get around 75% (2300/3000 = 0.76) of the G2's capacity before accounting for software differences.

The Nexus 4 has the same (similar?) battery as the Optimus G but still has worse battery life, so it's possible LG is also getting pretty good at getting the most out of their batteries. But that's hard to speculate on, so for now it's safe to say somewhere around or slightly below 75% of the G2's.

It's just the ratio of 2300/3000. I think people have a mystical way of thinking about battery life, but it's just as simple as the capacity in mAh. 2300 is ~77% of 3000 mAh, so you can assume (all other things equal) the battery life would be 77% of the G2, so if the G2 lasts 20 hours with 5 hours of screen time, the Nex 5 would last ~15 hrs with a little under 4 hours of screen time (again assuming all other things are equal, which they won't be).

Bascially, at best the N5's battery life will 77% of the G2. AT BEST, if the N5 and G2 are equal in every aspect except the battery.

But we know for a fact that it won't be, because there is variation in the software and hardware. But we don't know exactly how those variation interplay with each other, so at the moment we can only safely conclude that the N5 will have 77% or less battery life than the G2.

^ This. We can't know for sure until the phone comes out. Maybe 4.4 will have some awesome battery life improvements on the software side. Or maybe some of the hardware compromises in the Nexus 5 will make the battery life terrible. We'll just have to wait and see.

There is MUCH, much more to battery life than only battery size and screen size. The only way we can know for sure is wait and thoroughly test it ourselves. Anyone speculating how good the n5 battery is today is taking it straight out of their butts. It could be much worse than the g2, it could be just a bit worse than the g2, it could even be better than the g2.

As a current Verizon customer using a Galaxy Nexus, I look at it this way: any new phone will have a new battery that will hold more charge than the two year old battery in my two year old GNex. So even if the N5 does not have a 3000 mAh battery, I'm going to see a big improvement in battery life.

The Qx10 can be a battery hog, the wifi and screen on, plus the fact that once you start using it you don't want to disconnect just in case you miss a shot.
It does stay connected with the screen off, just don't exit the app.

NFC isn't much of a battery drain and the connection it'd created would be for like two minutes at most. Photos don't take long to take. No, I'd def not want it on my phone longer than it needed. I'd def take it off once use it completed.

NFC just pairs it up, the connection itself is wifi.
The issue I've found it it takes a good 10-15 seconds to connect to the app. So if you turn it off then want to take a photo you have to wait ages....
So I end up leaving it on and connected for as long as possible. A whole day of autograss racing drained my Z1

But the drain is better than missing the moment because you're fiddling! I found screen lock/off keeps the connection so it drains less.
If they could get the startup time down to a few seconds it would be much better.
It takes lovely photos, got some great ones walking the dog yesterday. Saw some squirrels that I could have zoomed in on, but by the time it was on they were long gone.
It is a little frustrating as it's a great idea, and the quality is brilliant. It's just so slow to get started!

I can't think of something that would occur so fast that I'd want to take a picture of. I'm not one of those people who take photos of flower pedals or some other uninterestingly trivial thing we see on Facebook these days. I usually just take photos when on vacation, birthday parties and things of that nature. If I need to capture an image of something fast, for whatever reason, I'll deal with the camera on the cellphone. That being said, I do hope Sony updates the software to make things half as slow. It's such an ingenious little device that deserves success.

Exactly, it's a great device and thats the only flaw I've found.
It's one of those things, they say the best camera is the one you have with you. You never know when there might be an amazing shot. But when that camera takes ages to turn on...